Changes coming to your site: The Parent Field

[#1]

Hello, I’m Rachel, a Product Manager working on Jira Service Management. I want to share some changes coming to your site in the next few months.

Since July of 2022, we’ve been changing how parent/child relationships are represented in Jira to give you a simple, consistent experience for all levels of your projects. Most of these changes have been confined to Jira Software – until today.

Starting in August 2024, we’re bringing the Parent field to Jira Service Management, which replaces the Epic link and Parent link fields. You may recognize this change as it also rolled out to Jira Software starting this year.

In this post, I want to talk to you today about

• how this improves your Jira Service Management experience
• what to expect when the change comes to your sites and
• what you need to do to prepare for this change

Introducing: The Parent field

What is it? The Parent field replaces both the Epic link and the Parent link fields.

Why is it? Epic link and Parent Link fields served similar but different purposes. As Jira has grown, we’ve outgrown the need for two fields of this nature. So to make Jira easier and simpler to use, we’ve merged them into one field.

What's new and how does it impact me?

When this change reaches your site, the Parent field will show by default alongside the Epic link or the Parent link fields – whichever you configured before. When these fields merge:

• any values that you have in the existing Epic link and Parent link fields will be automatically migrated to the Parent field. If you have values in both, then the value from the Epic link field will be chosen.
• The Epic Link and the Parent Link fields will be inaccessible and instead show a message to use the Parent field instead.

What do I need to do to prepare?

That’s the best part: nothing! These updates will apply automatically to your Jira site, meaning you don’t need to do anything. All of your values from your fields will be migrated, and any existing workflows that contain either field will be automatically updated.

What’s next?

As said before, we expect the changes to reach customers in August of 2024. If you have any questions, drop a comment below, or you can reach out to our support team.

[John Funk]

Great! Glad to see this rolling out. 

[YY Brother]

We all like "Parent" 👍🏻

[Jonathan Bohlmann]

Will clients be able to see Children in the Portal?

[James Hendrix]

@YY Brother Is there a way to achieve this parent linking between two story level issues that exist in different Jira projects? For example, I have a functional Story in PROJA project and a technical Task in TECHA project, and I would like to make the PROJA Story the parent of the TECHA Task.

Currently, Jira Cloud shows:

[YY Brother]

Hi @James Hendrix 

Parent field is just link between two work type hierarchies like Epic & Story/Task. We can't use it between the work items with the same level of hierarchy like Task and Story, no matter whether they're in the same or different projects. Hope it clarifies the usage of Parent.

Regards,

YY Bro